Abstract

This chapter provides a developed version of the Plenary Lecture given by Valentine Cunningham at the Iris Murdoch Centenary Conference, held at St Anne’s College in July 2019. The international audience of delegates found Cunningham’s provocative approach to his topic of Iris Murdoch, Eduard FraenkelFraenkel, Eduard, and questions about goodness, hands, and touching, distinctly controversial. Like Rowe, Cunningham takes up the ‘hot potato’ of changing sexual mores, revisiting Murdoch’s (and others’) experience of being taught by Fraenkel. At the time it was seen by some as a privilege to be pawed by the great Greek scholar, even an important aspect of what Cunningham terms ‘Fraenkelism’ (187) but in this century exception is taken. Fraenkel’s having been called out as ‘one more case of post-Harvey Weinstein male sexual predator’ (187) in 2017, The Fraenkel Room at Corpus Christi College was renamed The Refugee Scholars’ Room. This was against Cunningham’s judgement as he finds the goodness in Fraenkel’s teaching and scholarship outweighs his deplorable behaviour. The contextual background to this contentious opinion lies in Cunningham’s extensive and perceptive reflection on goodness in Murdoch’s fiction and how this is ‘imagined, aestheticised, defined, argued for, shown operating’ in her novels (182). Questions arising from this issue concern ‘matters of touch’ and ‘matters of what hands do’ (182) which Cunningham shrewdly delineates as the convergence of ‘the discourse of goodness and the discourse of touch’ (182). However readers may feel about these difficult moral issues, this essay will make them think very precisely about how their judgements on such matters are formed. And—as with Stephen Medcalf’s essay above—it is illuminating to capture Valentine Cunningham’s personal memories of his encounters with his Oxford colleagues, Iris Murdoch and John Bayley.